Nir­vana’s cul­tur­al stay­ing pow­er is a tes­ta­ment to the cross-gen­er­a­tional mag­ic that hap­pened when Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselić, and Dave Grohl played togeth­er for only a hand­ful of years in the 90s. Their influ­ence goes far deep­er than 90s nos­tal­gia for a grunge trend or the celebri­ty sta­tus of the late Cobain. Now almost 30 years after the front­man’s 1994 sui­cide, we see that influ­ence on a gen­er­a­tion born too late to see him live — one influ­enced more by hip hop than gui­tar rock and far less inter­est­ed in chal­leng­ing the cap­i­tal­ist sta­tus quo.

For artists like rap­per Post Mal­one, born July 4, 1995, Cobain is a major song­writ­ing influ­ence, even if Post Mal­one’s music sounds lit­tle like Nir­vana. “I loved Kurt so much,” says Mal­one, “and he’s been such an inspi­ra­tion to me, musi­cal­ly.” To prove his love, he’s tat­tooed Cobain on “two dif­fer­ent parts of his body,”  Shel­don Pearce writes at The New York­er, though Cobain might not have “rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed the love — the rapper’s stint shilling for Bud Light prob­a­bly wouldn’t fly, and Cobain once said white artists should leave rap to Black artists because ‘the white man ripped off the Black man long enough.’ ”

But that’s the thing about idols: once they’re gone, they no longer get a say in who wor­ships them and how. Last year, Post deliv­ered a Nir­vana trib­ute to ben­e­fit the UN’s COVID-19 Sol­i­dar­i­ty Response Fund for the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion. He did so respect­ful­ly. Backed by Travis Bark­er on drums, Bri­an Lee on bass, and Nic Mack on gui­tar, he hon­ored Cobain by don­ning a flower print dress, and by ask­ing his daugh­ter, Fran­cis Bean Cobain, for per­mis­sion to do the 15-song set. “I could nev­er want to offend any­body,” he told Howard Stern, “by try­ing to show sup­port, so I just want­ed to make sure that every­thing was okay — and it was okay, and we raised mon­ey for a good cause, and we got to play some of the most f*cking epic songs ever.”

Court­ney Love expressed sup­port, writ­ing, “Goose­bumps… Go have a mar­gari­ta Post Mal­one. Noth­ing but love from here.” Grohl and Novoselić also gave Mal­one their full approval. The for­mer Nir­vana bassist wrote that he was “hold­ing emo­tions back the whole show.” In a lat­er inter­view, Grohl com­ment­ed, “Even the die-hard Nir­vana peo­ple that I know were like, ‘dude, he’s kind of killing it right now.’ ” And they were right. Above, see the one-off band play “Fran­cis Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seat­tle,” “Come As You Are,” “About a Girl,” “Heart-Shaped Box,” and more clas­sic Nir­vana songs. The livestream raised $500,000 (includ­ing match­ing funds from Google) to help fight COVID-19 around the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Nir­vana Per­form as an Open­ing Band, Two Years Before Their Break­out Album Nev­er­mind (1989)

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

The Record­ing Secrets of Nirvana’s Nev­er­mind Revealed by Pro­duc­er Butch Vig

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Every­one knows the song, a warn­ing from a man or woman return­ing to the place that will destroy them. Yet they can­not turn back. The tragedy of “House of the Ris­ing Sun” lies in its inevitabil­i­ty. “The nar­ra­tor seems to have lost his free will,” writes Jim Beviglia, caught, per­haps, in the grip of an unbeat­able addic­tion. As soon as we hear those first few notes, we know the sto­ry will end in ruin. But what kind of ruin takes place there? Is the House of the Ris­ing Sun a broth­el or a gam­bling den, or both? Was it a real place in New Orleans? Maybe a pub in Eng­land? Or a place in the anony­mous songwriter’s imag­i­na­tion?

Eric Bur­don and the Ani­mals, who pop­u­lar­ized the song world­wide when they record­ed and released it in 1964, did­n’t know. Even Alan Lomax could­n’t suss out the song’s ori­gin, though he tried, and sus­pect­ed it may have orig­i­nat­ed with an Eng­lish farm work­er named Har­ry Cox who sang a song called “She Was a Rum One” with a sim­i­lar open­ing line.

Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan played “House of the Ris­ing Sun” in cof­fee­hous­es. Bur­don him­self picked the song up from the Eng­lish folk scene, and the Ani­mals first cov­ered the slow, sin­is­ter tune when they opened for Chuck Berry because they knew they “could­n’t out­rock” the gui­tar great.

“House of the Ris­ing Sun” has been record­ed by Lead Bel­ly, Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone, Dol­ly Par­ton, and vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er artist con­cerned with Amer­i­can roots music. “It’s so deep in the heart of this cul­ture,” says New Orleans gui­tarist Reid Net­ter­ville, who finds that peo­ple from all over the world know the lyrics when he plays the song on street cor­ners. Since the Ani­mals’ record­ing, it has become “one of the sin­gle most per­formed songs in music his­to­ry,” notes Poly­phon­ic in the video at the top, “with ren­di­tions in every genre you can think of, from met­al to reg­gae to dis­co.”

Maybe audi­ences around the world con­nect with this tale of ruin and despair because its set­ting is so mys­te­ri­ous and yet so per­fect­ly placed. Bur­don him­self, who vis­its New Orleans often, gets invit­ed to all sorts of strange places in the city, he says, pur­port­ing to be the tit­u­lar “House”: “I’d go to wom­en’s pris­ons, coke deal­ers’ hous­es, insane asy­lums, mens’ pris­ons, pri­vate par­ties. They just want­ed to get me there.” The ambi­gu­i­ty between the real and the sym­bol­ic makes the song adapt­able to any num­ber of dif­fer­ent kinds of voic­es. “It’s been described as an abstract metaphor but also a ref­er­ence to real his­tor­i­cal places,” notes Poly­phon­ic, and it’s gone from the lament of a “ruined” female nar­ra­tor to a dis­solute male voice with only a change in pro­nouns.

While there may be a hand­ful of spu­ri­ous claimants to the title of real House of the Ris­ing Sun, the ori­gin of the song remains unknown. But its allure is not a mys­tery. The house is “a place of vice, a place of dark­ness and fore­bod­ing” — a place that we both can’t seem to resist and that we’d do best to stay clear of. We’ll always have curios­i­ty about the dark cor­ners of the world; the warn­ing of “House of the Ris­ing Sun” will always be per­ti­nent, and moth­ers, often trag­i­cal­ly to no avail, will always tell their chil­dren about it, wher­ev­er and what­ev­er that den of sin may be.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

B.B. King Explains in an Ani­mat­ed Video Whether You Need to Endure Hard­ship to Play the Blues

Stream 35 Hours of Clas­sic Blues, Folk, & Blue­grass Record­ings from Smith­son­ian Folk­ways: 837 Tracks Fea­tur­ing Lead Bel­ly, Woody Guthrie & More

Aretha Franklin’s Pitch-Per­fect Per­for­mance in The Blues Broth­ers, the Film That Rein­vig­o­rat­ed Her Career (1980)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

By the time the Bea­t­les fin­ished The White Album, it seemed they might not ever make anoth­er record togeth­er. “The group was dis­in­te­grat­ing before my eyes,” record­ing engi­neer Geoff Emer­ick remem­bers. “It was ugly, like watch­ing a divorce between four peo­ple. After a while, I had to get out.” Emer­ick left, but thank­ful­ly the band hung in a while longer and man­aged to patch things up in the stu­dio to make their final record.

When they called Emer­ick to work on Abbey Road, they promised to get along for what would turn out to be their last album. (Emer­ick points out that on the cov­er they’re walk­ing away from Abbey Road stu­dios.) Not only did they man­age to avoid per­son­al con­flict, but more impor­tant­ly “the musi­cal telepa­thy between them was mind-bog­gling.” As if to seal the moment of accord for­ev­er, they end­ed the album, and the Bea­t­les, with a med­ley.

Abbey Road shows every mem­ber of the band ris­ing to their full song­writ­ing poten­tial, espe­cial­ly George Har­ri­son, who ful­ly came into his own with “Some­thing,” a song every­one knew would be “an instant clas­sic.” Har­ri­son became more con­fi­dent and talk­a­tive in inter­views, sit­ting down on the day of Abbey Road’s release with Aus­tralian music writer and John Lennon friend Ritchie York to offer his impres­sions of each track.

In the enhanced audio inter­view above, Har­ri­son briefly com­ments, track-by-track, on what he thinks of each song and the album as a whole. What is per­haps most inter­est­ing, giv­en Emer­ick­’s com­ment about “musi­cal telepa­thy,” is how the music seems to come from some­where else, a kind of intu­ition or chan­nel­ing that tran­scends the indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties of each Bea­t­le.

Take Ringo’s “Octopus’s Gar­den,” a song Har­ri­son loves. “On the sur­face,” he says, “it’s just — it’s like a daft kids’ song. But the lyrics are great, real­ly. For me, y’know, I find very deep mean­ing in the lyrics, which Ringo prob­a­bly does­n’t see, but all the things like… ‘We’ll be warm beneath the storm.’… Which is real­ly great, y’know, because it’s like this lev­el is a storm, and it’s always — y’know, if you get sort of deep in your con­scious­ness, it’s very peace­ful. So Ringo’s writ­ing his cos­mic songs with­out notic­ing!”

The genius of Lennon, says Har­ri­son, comes through par­tic­u­lar­ly in his tim­ing, “but when you ques­tion him as to what it is, he doesn’t know. He just does it nat­u­ral­ly.” As for the album as a whole, Har­ri­son says, “it all gels, it fits togeth­er and that, but… it’s a bit like it’s some­body else, y’know?.… It does­n’t feel as though it’s us.… It’s more like just some­body else.”

Har­ri­son does­n’t say much about the record­ing process, but he does talk about the song­writ­ing and influ­ences on the album. When he wrote “Some­thing,” he says, he imag­ined “some­body like Ray Charles doing it.” He calls Paul’s “Maxwell’s Sil­ver Ham­mer,” which Lennon hat­ed, an “instant sort of whis­tle-along tune” that peo­ple will either love or hate.

The con­ver­sa­tion even­tu­al­ly moves to Har­rison’s feel­ings about The White Album and oth­er top­ics. Where he real­ly opens up is near the end when the sub­ject of India comes up. We see him walk­ing away from Abbey Road on his own path. When York asks him about “the Indi­an scene,” Har­ri­son replies, “I dun­no, it’s like it’s kar­ma, my kar­ma.… I’m just pre­tend­ing to be, y’know, a Bea­t­le. Where­as there’s a greater job to be done.”

Hear the inter­view in full above and read a tran­script here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Har­ri­son “My Sweet Lord” Gets an Offi­cial Music Video, Fea­tur­ing Ringo Starr, Al Yankovic, Pat­ton Oswalt & Many Oth­ers

Watch George Harrison’s Final Inter­view and Per­for­mance (1997)

Watch Pre­cious­ly Rare Footage of Paul McCart­ney Record­ing “Black­bird” at Abbey Road Stu­dios (1968)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“I am cre­at­ing a rev­o­lu­tion here! I don’t want musi­cians, I want sabo­teurs, I want assas­sins, I want shock troops!” — Mal­colm McLaren in FX’s Pis­tol

“Peo­ple are try­ing to make it out as a bit of a joke, but it’s not a joke. It’s not polit­i­cal anar­chy either; it’s musi­cal anar­chy, which is a dif­fer­ent thing.” — John Lydon (John­ny Rot­ten), Inter­view with Mary Har­ron, 1976

“What do you think of Steve [Jones]?” says Mal­colm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sang­ster) to his part­ner Vivi­enne West­wood (Talu­lah Riley) before telling her his plans to man­age the future Sex Pis­tols in Oscar-win­ning direc­tor Dan­ny Boyle’s FX mini-series Pis­tol. “Very dam­aged,” says West­wood, “but that’s quite good.” This sits well with bud­ding impre­sario McLaren, who sees then-lead singer Jones as exact­ly the bomb he needs to throw at the estab­lish­ment. “He’s got noth­ing else to live for,” says McLaren cold­ly.

The kids in the UK punk scene McLaren and West­wood stage-man­aged may have been out­casts, but many also came from staid sub­ur­ban back­grounds, as did many of the punks in the down­town New York scene. When McLaren calls Jones (Toby Wal­lace) “the real deal,” he means the angry, drunk­en teenage face of a work­ing class with lit­tle left to lose. Boyle’s series sets Jones up as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what made British punk so angry and “edgy” (to use one of Jones’ favorite words). The very first scene recre­ates his famous theft of David Bowie’s instru­ments to start the band. Genius steal­ing from genius.

Jones not only steals famous musi­cians’ gear, but he joyrides in stolen cars, and tries to steal leather pants from SEX, McLaren and West­wood’s S&M‑themed bou­tique. There, future Pre­tenders front­woman Chrissie Hyn­de (Syd­ney Chan­dler) works the counter, and threat­ens to beat him with a crick­et bat. The focus on Jones almost exclu­sive­ly in the first episode sug­gests that he is the sin­gu­lar “Pis­tol” of the title.

Oth­er char­ac­ters show up even­tu­al­ly — front­man John­ny Rot­ten (Anson Boon) makes his appear­ance in the sec­ond episode (or “Track”) to bump Jones from vocals to gui­tar. The penul­ti­mate episode is titled “Nan­cy and Sid” in homage to Alex Cox’s cult biopic Sid and Nan­cy. But in the begin­ning, when the band was called “The Swankers,” it was all Steve Jones’ show, Boyle’s series sug­gests, from procur­ing the gear, to writ­ing the first songs, to land­ing McLaren as man­ag­er.

Why release a bio­graph­i­cal series on the Sex Pis­tols in 2022? The sto­ry has been told, in inter­views, mem­oirs, and films, by the band, their entourage, hang­ers-on, and fans, and their man­ag­er, styl­ists, road­ies, jour­nal­ists, and pho­tog­ra­phers. It has been told so many times, so many ways, it makes the mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives of Kuro­sawa’s Rashomon seem easy to rec­on­cile. (See com­par­isons between Boyle’s show and oth­er doc­u­ments above.) What could one more telling, stream­ing on a net­work once owned by Rupert Mur­doch and now owned by the Dis­ney Cor­po­ra­tion, add to the liv­ing mem­o­ry of 1970’s British Punk™?

We can hear some answers from series co-cre­ator Boyle in the inter­view clip just above with the BBC. He describes what the band meant to him when he was a uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent read­ing the news of the under­ground Lon­don in NME. “It’s only when you cre­ate true chaos,” he says, “that some­thing new can emerge.” Does Pis­tol bring some­thing new? The series is enter­tain­ing, recre­at­ing events famil­iar to us from any of the mul­ti­ple his­to­ries of the Sex Pis­tols and doing so in a stream­lined, hard­ly chaot­ic, nar­ra­tive style.

Keep­ing the focus square­ly on the hand­some, charis­mat­ic Jones in the first episode (and to a less­er extent dap­per orig­i­nal bassist Glen Mat­lock and boy­ish drum­mer Paul Cook) soft­ens the band’s usu­al por­trait. Maybe they seem more palat­able at first to the very estab­lish­ment McLaren tried to det­o­nate in his rev­o­lu­tion. But as Lydon, who hap­pi­ly took over as their spokesman, told Mary Har­ron in a 1976 inter­view, the idea that the Sex Pis­tols should be thought of as “social­ly sig­nif­i­cant” nev­er appealed to him. “We want to be AMATEURS,” he sneered.

They wrote scathing nihilist protest songs like “EMI” and “God Save the Queen” (which they played on the Thames on the Queen’s Sil­ver Jubilee in 1977, above). But the Pis­tols were not actu­al­ly anti-cor­po­rate anar­chists. They were anti­so­cial shock-rock the­ater. It is bewil­der­ing, nonethe­less — because of the weight of their influ­ence on polit­i­cal­ly-charged punk rock — to see them turned into fic­tion­al­ized heroes in cor­po­rate media. And it is jar­ring to hear Lydon praise Trump, Nigel Farage, and the far right, with­out a trace of irony, as the real inher­i­tors of punk. Nev­er one to with­hold an opin­ion, he’s made his views on the show clear (below): “It’s dead against every­thing we stood for.”

Iron­i­cal­ly, Mat­lock, who is cred­it­ed with writ­ing ten of the twelve tracks on Nev­er Mind the Bol­locks, Here’s the Sex Pis­tols, once said exact­ly the same thing about John­ny Rot­ten. So, what did the Sex Pis­tols stand for? Piss­ing peo­ple off, becom­ing absolute­ly hat­ed, and get­ting rich? Only the last part of McLaren’s plot failed when he lost con­trol of his mon­ster. For all his rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vor, even McLaren was ini­tial­ly shocked (then delight­ed, then hor­ri­fied and dis­gust­ed) by the band’s bad man­ners. Maybe writer and under­ground punk car­toon­ist John Holm­strom said it best: “It’s unbe­liev­able that a rock group that played no more than one hun­dred live per­for­mances… and exist­ed for only twen­ty-sev­en months, could become as inter­na­tion­al­ly dis­liked as the Sex Pis­tols.” It’s even more unbe­liev­able that they’ve become so inter­na­tion­al­ly beloved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sex Pis­tols Make a Scan­dalous Appear­ance on the Bill Grundy Show & Intro­duce Punk Rock to the Star­tled Mass­es (1976)

The Sex Pis­tols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Con­certs in Dal­las, Mem­phis, Tul­sa & More

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Very Last Con­cert (San Fran­cis­co, 1978)

The Sex Pis­tols’ Sid Vicious Sings Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”: Is Noth­ing Sacred?

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

By any mea­sure, David Bowie was a super­star. He first rose to fame in the nine­teen-sev­en­ties, a process gal­va­nized by his cre­ation and assump­tion of the rock­er-from-Mars per­sona Zig­gy Star­dust. In the fol­low­ing decade came Let’s Dance, on the back of which he sold out sta­di­ums and dom­i­nat­ed the still-new MTV. Yet through it all, and indeed up until his death in 2016, he kept at least one foot out­side the main­stream. It was in the nineties, after his aes­thet­i­cal­ly cleans­ing stint with gui­tar-rock out­fit Tin Machine, that Bowie made use of his star­dom to explore his full spec­trum of inter­ests, which ranged from the basic to the bizarre, the mun­dane to the macabre.

This sug­gests a good deal in com­mon between Bowie and anoth­er high-pro­file David of his gen­er­a­tion: David Lynch, long one of the most famous film direc­tors alive. “There are many obvi­ous, sur­face con­nec­tions and inter­sec­tions between Lynch and Bowie,” write film crit­ics Cristi­na Álvarez López and Adri­an Mar­tin. “Both have dab­bled in film and music, as well as paint­ing, the­atre and per­for­mance art. Both are actors — Bowie slight­ly more con­ven­tion­al­ly so than Lynch.” Lynch would no doubt agree with Bowie’s insis­tence that “my inter­pre­ta­tion of my work is real­ly imma­te­r­i­al,” that “it’s the inter­pre­ta­tion of the lis­ten­er, or the view­er, which is all-impor­tant.”

These words appear in López and Mar­t­in’s analy­sis of Twin Peaks, the tele­vi­sion series Lynch cre­at­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Mark Frost, and Out­side, the album Bowie cre­at­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Bri­an Eno. When it pre­miered on ABC in the spring of 1990, Twin Peaks became a minor sen­sa­tion by con­jur­ing a famil­iar yet deeply strange atmos­phere such as no one had nev­er seen on tele­vi­sion before. It also pio­neered what López and Adri­an Mar­tin call “the Dead Girl/Woman genre, which traces out a labyrinthine mys­tery from the dis­cov­ery of a young female corpse.” What brings Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er to Twin Peaks, Wash­ing­ton, we recall, is the mur­der of home­com­ing queen Lau­ra Palmer.

What brings Nathan Adler, a detec­tive in the Art Crimes unit, to Oxford Town, New Jer­sey is the mur­der of the four­teen-year-old Baby Grace Blue. Thus begins the Twin Peaks-inspired sto­ry­line of Out­side, Bowie’s own 1995 entry into the genre of the Dead Girl/Woman. Like Lynch and Frost’s show, Bowie’s album has a cast of eccentrics: Adler and Baby Grace, but also the likes of crim­i­nal “out­sider” Leon Blank; Alge­ria Touchshriek, deal­er in “art-drugs and DNA prints”; and a sin­is­ter fig­ure known as both the Artist and the Mino­taur. All are played by Bowie him­self, who makes use of var­i­ous accents (a tech­nique prac­ticed with his appear­ance in the 1992 Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me) and voice-pro­cess­ing tech­niques.

At the time this 75-minute “non-lin­ear Goth­ic Dra­ma Hyper-Cycle,” as Bowie labeled it, gave his lis­ten­ers a lot to take in, to say noth­ing of the major media out­lets attempt­ing to pub­li­cize it. “This new project is all about sex, vio­lence, and death,” says the CBC’s Lau­rie Brown in a typ­i­cal piece of tele­vi­sion cov­er­age. But it also deals with the merg­ing of those human eter­nals with art and pop­u­lar cul­ture, a process that fas­ci­nat­ed Bowie more and more as the nineties pro­gressed — as did “the re-emer­gence of Neo-Pagan­ism, rit­u­al body art, and the frag­men­ta­tion of soci­ety,” as he puts it in Out­side’s offi­cial mak­ing-of video.

Bowie and Eno intend­ed Out­side (offi­cial­ly 1. Out­side) as the first in a series that would ulti­mate­ly con­sti­tute “a diary in music and in tex­ture of what it felt like to be around at the end of the Mil­len­ni­um.” In one press con­fer­ence, Bowie hint­ed that “the nar­ra­tive might fall by the way­side,” much as Lynch and Frost orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to leave Lau­ra Palmer’s death unsolved. That the sec­ond vol­ume nev­er appeared only under­scores the tan­ta­liz­ing incom­plete­ness of Out­side, which López and Mar­tin high­light as anoth­er sim­i­lar­i­ty to Twin Peaks: “Both works are ser­i­al and mul­ti­ple, exist­ing in var­i­ous offi­cial and unof­fi­cial forms, in spin-offs, out­takes” — not least the nev­er-prop­er­ly-released “Leon suites” Bowie and Eno record­ed before the album itself — “and in numer­ous fan com­men­taries.”

A kind of cir­cle closed in 1997 when Out­side’s “I’m Deranged” sound­tracked the open­ing cred­its of Lynch’s Lost High­way. But the work con­tin­ued to hold out pos­si­bil­i­ties until the end of Bowie’s life: “We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fall­en through the cracks,” Eno said. “We talked about revis­it­ing it, tak­ing it some­where new.” Despite his Lynchi­an resis­tance to inter­pre­ta­tion, Bowie did acknowl­edge even in 1995 the the­mat­ic impor­tance of mor­tal­i­ty itself. Out­side’s first sin­gle was called “The Heart’s Filthy Les­son,” and “the filthy les­son in ques­tion is the fact that life is finite.” For him, “know­ing that I’ve got a finite time in life on Earth actu­al­ly clar­i­fies things and makes me feel quite buoy­ant.” Bowie knew — or learned — that life is too short not to fol­low your fas­ci­na­tions to their lim­its.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

Watch the Twin Peaks Visu­al Sound­track Released Only in Japan: A New Way to Expe­ri­ence David Lynch’s Clas­sic Show

David Bowie & Bri­an Eno’s Col­lab­o­ra­tion on “Warsza­wa” Reimag­ined in a Com­ic Ani­ma­tion

When Bil­ly Idol Went Cyber­punk: See His Trib­ute to Neu­ro­mancer, His Record­ing Ses­sion with Tim­o­thy Leary, and His Lim­it­ed-Edi­tion Flop­py Disk (1993)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.